Monday, July 03, 2006

Here’s something to consider as the hurricane season approaches: remember Katrina and lawless New Orleans (better known as N’awlins to some of us)?

New Orleans has a pretty horrendous crime rate, wouldn’t you say? Ranks right up there with Los Angeles, Chicago, Cincinnati - all those cities that the MSM tells us are failing. Which perhaps they are, by American terms.

However, let’s compare the crime rate in lawless New Orleans with the crime rate in, say, the city it was named for: Orléans, France. In New Orleans, the per capita rate is given in the hundred thousands. Thus, according to this report, the 2004 rate for New Orleans, for all crime, was 6,110.3 per 100,000 population. Pretty awful, when you compare it to say, Minneapolis, which is only 6,278.2 per 100,000 people. Oops. There goes Minneapolis.

Well, never mind. There’s a law-abiding city out there somewhere. Let’s try the gang city - Los Angeles. 4,347.4 per 100,000. Hmm…all those illegal aliens and Los Angeles comes in below New Orleans? Are we missing something here? Find the moral, Waldo.

But wait. I set out to compare the gun-owning, rip-snorting, trouble-making American criminal element in New Orleans with its counterpart in Orléans, France. Everyone knows Europe is more evolved than America, more sophisticated, more law-abiding – they sure have plenty of laws to abide by, don’t they? The European species is more restrained, civilized, blah blah, than the crude Homo americanus vulgaris.

According to Urban Audit, Liège has the highest crime rate of all European cities (EU27), with 256.13 recorded crimes per 1,000 population in 2001.

Hmm…that was five years ago. What do you suppose it is now? The statistics for American crime were drawn from the figures in 2004, three years later.

In researching the numbers, I came across two interesting sites. The first one, entitled “The United States versus the World” bemoans our incarceration rate. Cuba comes in for kudos because of its humane treatment of prisoners:

In Cuba, the emphasis is more on rehabilitation and a return to the community than on punishment or societal isolation. Prisoners are allowed to wear street clothes, earn a comparable income (to that of a free person who holds the same occupation), and are incarcerated in their home province no matter what their security level is. Additionally, prisoners become eligible for a conditional release program halfway through their sentence (for sentences of under five years), through which they work on farms or in factories with co-workers who are not informed of their prisoner status. Through this program, offenders are also able to visit their families at home (unsupervised) twice a month for three days at a time.

Of course, the words “political prisoner” never appears anywhere in this “report.” Just ask The Ladies in White what they think of this load of horse manure.

Another site proved more interesting. This was a blog called “Useful Fools” but it doesn’t seem to have been updated recently. Nonetheless, it floats out there in cyberspace with some good statistics for 2003:

Here are Interpol 2001 crime statistics (rate per 100,000):

4161 — US

7736 — Germany

6941 — France

9927 — England and Wales

Thus the US has a substantially lower crime rate than the major European countries!

Here are the Interpol 1995 crime statistics (rate per 100,000):

5278 — US

8179 — Germany

6316 — France

7206 — England & Wales

Hence the trend in the US is towards a lower crime rate, while the trend in Europe (except Germany) is towards an increasing crime rate.

In America, your chances for violence increase if you’re dealing drugs or if you’re married. In Europe, it’s open season on everyone. Equal opportunity hate crimes, perhaps?

By the way, Mr. Belien allows as to how he would feel safer in New Orleans.

Oh, to hell with "Mr. Belien". He's a religious fanatic. Obviously he isn't even remotely as bad as a Muslim, but he's still a religious fanatic. I stopped reading his site the moment I started noticing gems like "Europeans have foolishly replaced God by the State as the one on whom they rely to take care of all their needs from cradle to grave. The religious vacuum has led to a demographic vacuum, because those who lose faith in God lose faith in the future as well."

I tried to look at statistics at Interpol's site, but I'm not an authorized police user so they were unavailable. Nationmaster, on the other hand, reports (1998-2000 statistics I think) that the United States has the most prisoners in the world (~2,000,000). In total crimes, the US is number one (~23,000,000). In crimes per capita, the US is #8, with the UK at #6 and France and Germany below the US at #11 and #14.

On the other hand, who cares? Am I supposed to be happy that the US has more crime, or that Europe has more crime? I don't particularly like this blog entry's anti-European gloating. You can't expect people to drop their anti-American attitudes if you're not willing to do the same for Europe.

Completely off topic, but I was just looking up some figures about Holland.

Zerosumgame said that 50,000 people are leaving holland every year. Big impressive sounding figurem, and last year it was definitely true, though the figure was much lower in previous years. Dutch emigration is picking up quite rapidly, to be sure. However, over the last 5 years, 20,000 somalis (muslim or otherwise) living in Holland moved on to the UK, where it's easier to get state benefits. that's just Somali immigrants; africa is a big place, and Holland has had a lot of immigrants. However, Holland is now severely curtailing its benefits system and is has tightened up its immigration system, requiring work permits and holding immigrants in detention centres until they're deprted or can prove they need to stay, which makes me wonder wonder how many of those native dutch are leaving because of immigration, and how many have decided to proverbialy run to canada at the state of their country "abandoning" its liberal past, and how many of these "natives" are actually immigrants moving on to new pastures.

Now, I don't see GoV particularly gloating about anything. The writers here strike me as a fairly level-headed pair. I agree with ths piece too; the number of tiems I've had to tell people about rthe relative crime rates in the US and, say, Britain... it really annoys me that our emdia always hides this.

Actually the comparison between the US as a single country, and various countries over here, isn't really fair. Fairer would be to compare, say, Florida or New York with the UK. Now NY, I believe, has a fairly similar crime statistic to Britain and probably higher now that I think about it. Florida, with much more freedom of gun ownership and property defence, has a massively lower crime statistic. The crims are too scared to break in to people's houses because they know they'll be shot if they do. In fact, they're scared to do a lot of things, because you can shoot someone, hang them over your window as if they were breaking in and no questons will be asked. It sounds barbaric to the kind of people who have high fences, 24 hour bodyguards and security cameras around their homes - in other words, people who have no idea how the world works anymore - and to the sort of people who don't have to live with caily crime, but it bloody well works.

Are these crimes at all categorized by severity? If you read The Policeman's Blog (as you should) regularly, you'll notice that a familiar theme is the mind-boggling amount of paperwork and statistical tracking, which powerfully encourages the conversion of trivialities into "crime" statistics, in the name of improving the "detection" rate. If similar processes are at work elsewhere in the EU, it's likely to skew the statistics.

You're right: that's a great blog. Very mordant and amusing! Definitely one for the blogroll.

____________

JC supercop--

If you don't like the blog, just move along, sonny...see the button up on the right of the page? Next blog? Push it.

I simply do not understand people who show up to complain about how they don't like some post or other. Don't you have anything better to do with your time?

As for Belien's belief or lack of it, who gives a fig if you, personally, don't like this feature of his? And you're right: it *is* a feature, it's not a bug...he's not working to remove it. Nor are we, JC.

Know something? You're daft. Anyone who uses the nic you do to complain about someone else's belief in a deity has got bats in his belfry.

I like Paul Belien and I will continue to champion his cause. Stick it, chum.

Having the perogatives of a blog administrator, and not being nearly as nice as the Baron, if you come 'round here again with that attitude, I'll boot your butt outen the door.

As my sainted Irish mither would have said, you're an idjit. Go be dumb somewhere else.

I agree. If we freed all the drug users (I have my doubts about the big sellers -- some wicked, wicked dudes) we'd be doing the country a service. While generally I like privatizing jobs that business can do better than can gummint, I do think the move to privatize prisons was a mistake. It became a growth industry.

I know a few former drug "felons" who ended up in the hoosegow after failing at rehab. Intelligent and funny people who deserved a better break. One of them -- who as a convicted felon couldn't vote -- was the town's manager for Ralph Nader's last campaign. We are still friends, even though our politics are from different planets.

Another problem we could greatly reduce is the number of domestic violence murders. Our legal/judicial system doesn't treat those seriously *enough* and chronic cases end up lethal.

Paradoxically, we could improve things by treating women more seriously. The fact that in my state a woman can cry "rape" even when she and her companion were equally intoxicated at the time is an indicator that women aren't seen as full adults. This happens on college campuses all the time and the administrators leap into the fray by mandating "date rape" clasees for all the men and no mandatory AA meetings for anyone. It's disgusting.

I think jc is a troll who's been here before. Click his profile and notice it was created in July, 2006. New name, same old gar-bage...more likely his name is Legion.

Don't bother responding, mackety. He doesn't do dialogue, just hate. And then he wants you to argue with him...some people don't get the difference between ranting and dialogue. He's an example of one of those unfortunates, and the price one pays for having a comments section.

While the *real* Jesus Christ said we have to love our enemies, he didn't say we couldn't have any...and this troll definitely fits that category.

Be warned, though: he's wasting your time and energy. If he were for real, he'd never have stopped to comment in the first place since he has nothing to add to the conversation, but lots to dither about. Someone who chooses to denigrate a writer -- in this case, Belien -- because of his religious beliefs, or his lack of them, isn't a serious person.

Moving on, does anyone have something to add to m. simon's ideas in the first comment?

"I think jc is a troll who's been here before. Click his profile and notice it was created in July, 2006. New name, same old gar-bage...more likely his name is Legion."

Hah hah. Hardly. I've never had a Blogger account before, so I've never commented here. First it's flaming, and now it's the old and reliable "well you're a troll" argument. I'm actually from Jihad Watch, I comment there under the same name.

"Don't bother responding, mackety. He doesn't do dialogue, just hate. And then he wants you to argue with him...some people don't get the difference between ranting and dialogue. He's an example of one of those unfortunates, and the price one pays for having a comments section."I don't do dialogue, I just hate? That's kind of hilarious coming from someone who immediately starts aggressively flaming me and then deletes my replies! I'd say that constitutes hating and refusing dialogue. Allow me to point out that you're a hypocrite of epic proportions.

"While the *real* Jesus Christ said we have to love our enemies, he didn't say we couldn't have any...and this troll definitely fits that category."I'm sure you have plenty of enemies, since all it takes for someone to end up on your shitlist is to disagree with you about something.

"Be warned, though: he's wasting your time and energy. If he were for real, he'd never have stopped to comment in the first place since he has nothing to add to the conversation, but lots to dither about. Someone who chooses to denigrate a writer -- in this case, Belien -- because of his religious beliefs, or his lack of them, isn't a serious person."Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't you opposing Islamic Jihad? Isn't that a bit like, I don't know, denigrating people for their religious beliefs? Of course I'm not saying that Belien has anything to do with Islamic Jihadists, but they both have religious beliefs. I don't have anything againts religion, but many of Belien's comments are simply religious extremism. I oppose religious extremism regardless of what religion it belongs to. I also don't think that you're in any position to accuse others of denigrating people.

More than two-thirds who offered an opinion said America is essentially an imperial power seeking world domination. And 81 per cent of those who took a view said President George W Bush hypocritically championed democracy as a cover for the pursuit of American self-interests.'

For all the failures of the Great European Adventure, there is one accomplishment of the old Euro-Arab Dialogue and its successor, the Euro-Med Institute, which sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb, the vilification of the United States.

Facts be damned…maintain and embrace the illusions of greatness and success of Eurabia’s party line!

And then I looked at the larger site and whoowhee --looks like a version of Truthout: large doses of paranoia and Bush Derangement Syndrome. The strangest feature was a book proclaiming Pope Paul VI had a double...creepy stuff!

I will say they are equal op paranoiacs, as they have another one up on the Masons.

I don't know why anyone in his right mind would gloat about crime rates in Europe vis-a-vis those in the US.

Increasing crime rates in Europe, I would argue, are probably largely the result of mass immigration. Keep in mind, too, European security forces are reluctant to enforce the law in the many 'no-go' areas currently occupied by Third World settler populations.

Further, crime in the US, particularly amongst the illegal alien populations, is most likely HUGELY under-reported.

At least Europeans are starting to take the immigrant invasion seriously and do something about it. Which is more than can be said about naive, pie-in-the-sky Americans who seem to boast about how quickly their country is regressing to Third World standards.

As bad as things are going to get in Europe and North America, something tells me that Europe will still be around long after the US has sunk into a quagmire of chronic crime, corruption, social instablity, racial conflict, and civil war.

I don't know kenyacowboy, I think it could go either way... maybe we'll both disintegrate.

As for Europe taking the dangers of immigration seriously, there's hardly any evidence of that. Some countries are introducing more strict laws, but what they really need to do is ban all Muslim immigration, period. Nobody is going to do that.

As for statistics, we have had a few examples lately in Denmark as to how statistics can be misused to further a political cause.

For example, a leftie "scientist" from a university published a "research" paper, in which he had counted all the times over a certain period in which the government or the opposition had been mentioned in the danish media.

He included everything and then concluded that our NOTORIUSLY leftleaning media were in fact abusing their mediapower bu favoring the government in the papers, tv, etc.

What he forgot to mention though was, that most of the pieces in the media about the government were to a greater or lesser degree hateful smearjobs or less than serious coverage of the governments politics, whereas the opposition got mostly positive coverage.

So by manipulating the numbers and manufacturing evidence he managed to prove that the government were in control of the in his thinking rightwing media.

The wast majority of ordinary danes know very well of course, that most of the media with a few exceptions are in fact very much leftwing, as media mostly are everywhere in the western world.

For example. TWO THIRDS of all danish journalists who were asked by their own union turned out to be consistently voting for what can only be described as the extreme left wing, whereas probably no more than maybe 10 percent can be said to vote for something reasonably described as MODERATE rightwing.

Yet the leftist "researcher" still managed to come to the conclusion that the media were rightwing, by counting the anti government smear pieces, as progovernment coverage!!

This story goes a long way to show how the left works.

Is it any wonder then that the left likes the islamists so much. When they have so very much in common. Like Taqqyia for example.

Enuf, there's a poll from about 6 months ago that shows similar statistics to the one that you've just posted, but it also mentioned that the majority of the respondents trusted the television more than politicians. Similar numbers for other media. Given that, and given the severe anti-americanism that our media suffer from all the time, is it any wonder that a population fed on a steady diet of "bush is evil" and "the americans are all fat slobs, even their movies say so!" are reacting so? The majority in this country get theri entire view of the world from the BBC, not through choice, but because they aren't aware of the alternatives. And those alternatives are, of course, denigrated by the BBC and other media, which the population trust implicitly, so they refuse to consider them...

It's reaching a tipping point though. Sooner or later reality fails to match up to the fantasy on the screen and people start to think. And I've said it before: polls reflect exactly what the polsters want them to reflect. It's so easy to load the questions and, anyway, you can just play with the ansers until you get the picture you want...

The NRA has been all over this trend for about a year, now. They've been covering the results of the British gun ban and the right of the criminals to "burgle". No lie. Check out NRA news and they'll probably have some stuff there. I get America's First Freedom (monthly mag) and that's where they've been digging up this info.

Gloating? Do you really think that we're gloating that any innocent person is killed? Or that some are killed more there as opposed to here? Think again, bucko. The info in the post is simply correcting widely-held misperceptions and slamming European elite hypocrisy.

Comparing countries to countries is necessary, because that's the level at which the rhetoric flies. No-one from "over there" is running around comparing the UK or Belgium, etc. to Florida. I think you all know why -- that would seriously impinge upon the European country's sense of pride. Why, is the best they can do make a comparison to one or two states in the US? They won't argue that way. If I was them, I wouldn't either.

In the 50s and 60s I'm told (by those that did so) a young lady could hitch hike from the arctic circle to the mediterranean in Europe without having a bad experience.

In the mid-90s you could still wander freely through just about any town in western europe - day or night - without having to worry about running into bad suburbs (been there, did that myself), or be worried about more than pickpockets on the trains. But the signs were appearing - areas in urban Holland and France where white people were just not welcome.

Now?

Its a damn shame to say the least. Going downhill fast :(. I want the old Old Europe back.

I'm feeling a little lazy today, but is there any data comparing violent crime rates between American cities and European ones?

I would venture that European cities are not yet caught up in murder rates with American cities, although I'm sure the gap is closing -- as much due to drops in murder in American cities (New York went from 2,300 in 1990 to 550 murders last year) as it is to rising murder rates in Europe.

Should the Baron ever get bored, perhaps he could use his geospatial coding skillz to illustrate the numbers you speak of.

Something like "Ever Bloodier Union," perhaps?

Also, to the gn0b criticism of Belien:

Isn't it worth asking if his statements re: the less preferred status of "secular" procedures can be verified by criteria that do not include values unique to religion (I'm not sure I can conceive of any...which brings up a whole other interesting topic...)?

Belien's criticisms are interesting because I think they play in Daniel Dennets world in which religion is not simply a differentiating badge but a causal actor that plays in all realms of human affairs: cultural, political, economic etc.

In this respect, perhaps we can consider values that are labeled as "religious" to be not so mysterious or impossible to evaluate and communicate; indeed, Huntington's vision of our future would demand that culture be evaluated along the lines that Dennet proposes. And 9/11 has compelled many do to just that from both sides of the political spectrum.

While intriguing, what stumps me is how you represent culture in an objective fashion. Certainly, the internet allows interesting visualizations of cultural groups, and you can get a Google divination on how popular a cultural term is. But the science of culture has yet its renaissance, though the pressures documented in the Gates of Vienna are cataloguing its progress. Indeed, Baron's Bloody Borders project was just such an entrant.

I don't know if the comparisons are there, though one could make them from using various statistics. Here, I used a European site and an American one, and had to do the math since the former used a rate per thousand capita, where the US site used 100,000. Also, I couldn't get corresponding years. The US ones were more recent.

One has to be wary of the whole darn thing anyway, as there are good reasons for citing low and high by different municipalities and different law enforcement agencies...

The post really got started when I noticed Paul Belien's stats for Liége and was amazed at how high it was. I wrote to ask where he got his #s and he sent me to the site.

There are so many variables. I would agree that America has a higher murder rate and always will have, given our frontier history, our 2nd amendment ferocity, and (currently) the internecine drug wars and territorial disagreements among gangs.

In the latter case, as in domestic violence, it is not "stranger" crime; these people know one another.

However, paradoxically, I think that the gun laws here keep things safer for the general population, as studies have proved over and over again. Even criminals play the odds.

Your chances for murder and mayhem go up to the extent you hang with the thugs or you have the misfortune to have a mate with a short fuse and a .45...I've met some of the latter in my former work.

One of the saddest things Britain ever did was to disarm its citizens. Stalin said that was the easiest way to undermine the populace. Turns out he was right.

BTW, I wonder if anyone has done correlating statistics between murder and those on the dole. *That* would be an interesting study.

I don't know about cities in general, but Manchester has one of the highest instances of gun death in the entire country after London, comparable to some US cities. And it's not the highest in europe as far as I know.

Lowest rate of crime per-capita: switzerland, where you're not merely allowed, but required to own a gun.

When it comes to murder rates I havent got a clue where to find those, but I DO know that for example Sweden has a murder rate about twice that of Denmark, and I have no doubt it has to do with how different crimes are handled by police.

In denmark Murder investigation are high priority. Which means that something like 90 % of all murderers are found and jailed. Next thing should be to increase punishment in my opinion.

Generally I would say I just DONT trust these stats, because as someone said before, they can be twisted to show just about whatever you want them to show.

It DOES seem however like crime rates are generally going down in USA and up in Europe.

my wife is french, from avignon, her parents and godparents and grandmother live in marseille, and the subjective impression is that things have gone downhill fast in the last 3 or 4 years. all of this -- anecdotally, not based on anything scientific -- is attributed to arabs.

While immigrants in the UK maybeoverrepresented in crime statisticsthere are what they call hoodieswhich are youths wearing those sweatshirts with hoods who are amenace to the community too. Forexample a gathering of louts of this genre gathered outside the home of Portugese family after theEnglish football team lost to thePortugese team and began attackingit. The police will investigate theincident as this is a 'hate crime'and as such receives high priority.

Lesser offenses, and by that I meancrimes that are not anti PC do notmerit much attention by the policeand they are reluctant to make areport even when a citizen reportsa crime. This makes English crimestats of little value at least ascompared to American ones. Don'tknow how other European countriesfare in this department.

Suffice it to say that in Britaintoday there is a sort of ClockworkOrange culture where High streetscan become no go zones because ofmarauding drunken youths. Whilegun crime is a lot lower than inthe US it is rising and the Britishpress is full of stories bemoaningthe 'knife culture' that thugs and'chavs' have created.

As has been noted, prison time ismeted out far less frequently andsentences are remarkable light byAmerican standards when they areimposed. Raping a child can resultin less than 5 years in prison andmurder less than 10.

For me, the bottom line is that I feel safe where I live in the Southeastern United States. It has been a while since I have checked the crime statistics for my area, but I'm not sure what the point would be, since the "situation on the ground" seems just fine. I've witnessed one crime (of any sort) in my entire life. I am not and have never been involved with drugs, so my chances of getting into a dangerous situation are drastically reduced.

I too have encountered Europeans who think that my country is crime-riddled and that I go about my daily affairs fearing for my life. When these Europeans find out that I have a license to carry a firearm (and do so often), they feel further vindicated. But I don't really feel any less safe when I leave home without a Glock on my hip, maybe just a little bit less "prepared" (which is contrary to nature for this former Boy Scout). I know that the chances of me actually needing a firearm to defend my life are pretty slim. The flip side of that coin is that the one time I did need a firearm (the single crime I have witnessed was a violent, race-motivated assault—black against white), I didn't have it, and so I watched helplessly.

There is also an immense satisfaction that comes from living in a country that does not (for the most part) infringe on one of our most important inalienable rights, namely the right to self-defense. I firmly believe that if we do not exercise our rights, we will lose them. And so I joined the other 4% of residents in my state and registered to carry a firearm. To this day, I've never needed it, and I hope it stays that way.